ISJR - Newsletter

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12th Issue - May 2006 , edited by Sampson Lee Blair

1st Issue; June 2001, edited by Ron Cohen
2nd Issue; November 2001, edited by Ron Cohen
3rd Issue; February 2003, edited by Dahlia Moore
4th Issue; July 2003, edited by Dahlia Moore
5th Issue; November 2003, edited by Dahlia Moore
6th Issue; March 2004, edited by Dahlia Morre
7th Issue; December 2004, edited by Sampson Lee Blair
8th Issue; March 2005, edited by Sampson Lee Blair
9th Issue; June 2005, edited by Sampson Lee Blair
10th Issue; September 2005, edited by Sampson Lee Blair
11th Issue; February 2006, edited by Sampson Lee Blair

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Baustelle!!!

Contents

• Presidential Address
• The 2005 Morton Deutsch Award
• The ISJR Early Career Contribution Award 2006
• Member Activities
  
• New Journal!
• Upcoming Events
  

• Getting to know Berlin
• PDF-Version of Newsletter
  

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     President’s Address

I cordially invite you to our next General Business Meeting which will take place at August 4, at the 11^th Conference of ISJR held at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Our General Business Meeting in Berlin will have two new features. It will be my pleasure to start our meeting for the first time with the honors provided by ISJR and SJR. Moreover, the topic membership dues should become a regular topic for our meetings reminding us to discuss whether the dues are still reasonable to finance the aims of the society. The impression of the Executive Board is that dues should be slightly increased to enable the society to build some assets to better serve the aims of ISJR.

We set a change of the bylaws on the agenda. This is due for three reasons. The German authorities including the office responsible for registering societies as well as the tax office providing tax exempt status to a society are not satisfied with our bylaws and proposed necessary changes. In addition, we discussed in Regina that we want the Editor of Social Justice Research being part of the Executive Board of ISJR. Finally, we discussed in Regina that the bylaws should clearly state that membership expires for member who fail to pay dues for two consecutive years. The proposed new bylaws are given as an enclosure and each change is highlighted in yellow.

Amendments to the bylaws can only be decided by vote at a General Business Meeting with a quorum of at least 20% of the members. Thus, please, visit our General Business Meeting in Berlin! In the case that less than 20% of the members attend the General Business Meeting, the following General Business Meeting has a quorum regardless of the number of attending members.

In Berlin, we also want to discuss whether we should strive for moving our society from Germany, where it is registered in Potsdam, to the US or another English speaking country. The reasoning behind this idea is the experience that the Executive Board has to do a lot of correspondence with German authorities. As a consequence, at least one member of the Executive Board must be German speaking and this may be seen as a restriction in the future. As we all speak English, it may be reasonable to move the society to an English speaking country. This possible advantage has to be contrasted, however, with the expenses of such a move. The change of the registered office of ISJR cannot be done without a lawyer. This costs up to 2.000 $.

I wish all of us an exciting conference and look forward meeting you at the General Business Meeting.

Claudia Dalbert, President ISJR

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The 2005 Morton Deutsch Award

The Morton Deutsch award is given annually by ISJR for the best article published in Social Justice Research every year, with preference given to contributions from investigators who are relatively early in their research careers.  The 2005 winners are Laurie T. O’Brien and Christian S. Crandall for their article entitled “Perceiving Self-Interest: Power, Ideology, and Maintenance of the Status Quo” (published in the March 2005 issue of SJR).  Congratulations to the award recipients!  They will be officially recognized at the ISJR conference in Berlin, along with last year’s winner (Buju Dasgupta).  The committee this year was comprised of Claudia Dalbert, Linda Skitka, and John Jost (chair).

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The ISJR Early Career Contribution Award 2006

The International Society for Justice Research (ISJR) is delighted to present its first Early Career Contribution Award to Jan-Willem van Prooijen. With this award, the Society recognizes excellent young justice scholars. Van Prooijen has made significant contributions to two fields of justice research: procedural justice and retributive justice. His work focuses on the question of why people claim procedural justice and resent its violations, and on individual differences in these tendencies. In particular, the findings from a series of inspired and well-designed experiments have enriched our knowledge about the impact of social status on people's expectations of just procedures in decision making. 

Jan-Willem van Prooijen has demonstrated that it is the salience of the concept of status that impacts procedural justice evaluations, rather than status per se. When status is made salient, observers respond more strongly to the justice features of the procedure (e.g., voice, no voice) and consequently differ more strongly in their procedural justice evaluations according to the procedural justice characteristics. This holds independent of the individuals' own status. By integrating cognitive psychology into his research, van Prooijen has provided a first explanation for this finding. Using a word completion task, he has shown that status salience makes justice representations more accessible, thus substantiating the notion that status salience makes people more sensitive to variations in procedures by increasing the accessibility of justice concerns.

Besides significantly advancing our understanding of procedural justice effects, van Prooijen's research thus illustrates what can be gained from integrating social cognition methodologies into justice psychology research.

Jan-Willem van Prooijen is Assistant Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. He studied Psychology at the University of Leiden, where he received his PhD in 2002.

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Member Activities

As with our previous newsletter, I sent a mass e-mail in which I appealed for more information about members’ activities.  Once again, the membership has obliged my request – Thank you and keep it coming!

Presentations & Publications

Otto, K., Boos, A., Dalbert, C., Schöps, D. & Hoyer, J. (2006). Posttraumatic symptoms, depres­sion, and anxiety of flood victims: The impact of the belief in a just world. Personality and Indi­vidual Differ­ences, 40, 1075-1084.

Schmitt, M. & Maes, J. (2006). Equity and justice. In J. Bryant & P. Vorderer (Eds.), Psychology of Entertainment (pp. 273- 289). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Funding

Manfred Schmitt (Universität Koblenz-Landau) received a grant from the German Science Foundation for his project “Moderators of implicit-explicit consistency.”

Promotions, Awards, & Recognitions

Laurie Barclay has accepted a position at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Elizabeth Mullen will be starting as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the fall.  She is currently a post doctoral fellow at Northwestern University.

Randall E. Osborne (Texas State University-San Marcos) was recently promoted to Full Professor of Psychology.  He was also awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching.

David L. Patient has taken a position as Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Economics and Management (FCEE-Catolica) at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon.

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New Journal!

Journal of Judgment and Decision Making.

The newly-formed open-access journal, Judgment and Decision Making, welcomes submissions related to that field.  It is the journal of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (http://www.sjdm.org).  See http://journal.sjdm.org for information.

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Upcoming Events

The 11^th International Social Justice Conference
Social Justice in a World of Change:
Interdisciplinary Approaches
International Society for Justice Research

August 2-5, 2006
Berlin
 
Humboldt University

This is the final reminder that the deadline for paper submissions to the 11th International Social Justice Conference is May 1, 2006.
 
Please visit the conference website www.isjr2006.org for online submission and registration. Reduced registration fees are granted until April 30 only.
 
Contact: Bernd Wegener, Humboldt University, Institute of Social Sciences, D-10099 Berlin; 49-30-2093-4422; fax 49-30-2093-4430; email wegener@isjr2006.org

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Getting to know Berlin

Contributed by Andrew Roth

Berlin is a fascinating city but not a lighthearted one. Steeped in history, a witness to the best and worst events of our century, Berlin has always been a city at the very center of the convulsive conflicts, movements, and people that have shaped our modern world. To walk the streets here is to experience that history in a way no text can convey; it is sometimes bracing and sometimes overpowering. You can still see bomb-flecked facades from a war half a century ago, the all-too numerous memorials of remembrance and repentance, and remnants of the Wall that once divided the city and a continent.

Adding to that frisson is the bustle and energy of a united city creating itself as the capital of a reunited country and the hub of a resurgent central Europe. The last few years saw dozens of huge construction projects arise as a new government quarter was carved out of land once literally walled up and the sound of building echoed often through the city blocks. Now the future of Berlin is as palpable as the past.

Berlin is a sprawling city, nearly as large as Los Angeles, of about three and a half million people, known for its liveliness and tolerance. Young Germans flock here to drop out; Eastern Europeans and Turks come for economic opportunities and together they have created one of the most diverse and liberal cities in the country.

It is not however, a particularly beautiful or especially prosperous one. With little economic activity beside the government and service industries, the economy remains stagnant. Berlin suffers from an unemployment rate of about 20% and perennial budgetary problems. Reconstruction is, obviously, a long term project.

Foreigners make up about 13% of the population, and Berlin is said to be the third largest Turkish city after Istanbul and Ankara. It also hosts the largest Jewish community in Germany, some 12,000 or so, most of them recent arrivals from the former Soviet Union. The renovated New Synagogue on Oranienburgerstrasse is a showpiece of the reinvigorated Jewish community in the city.

Originally a small trading village hugging the bank of the Spree River, Berlin slowly developed as the power and prestige of Prussia swelled in the eighteenth century under Frederick the Great. But it was not until the nineteenth century that Berlin could claim a place in the first rank of European capitals. By the middle of that century, Germany’s startling rapid industrial growth had created the world’s third largest economy. German unification in 1871 made Berlin the capital of the second German Reich (the first was the Holy Roman Empire, which flourished in the Middle Ages) and turned it into a metropolis that could rival London and Paris.

The population topped 2 million by 1900 and the city spread out and swallowed the many bucolic villages outside the center, transforming some to garden suburbs for the comfortable middle class and others to squalid tenement districts for the growing industrial poor.

Claiming a place as a leading European city meant establishing the appropriate cultural trappings, and Berliners went about collecting the necessary art and antiquities with typical German thoroughness. Thanks to these efforts, Berlin now boasts several world-class collections. Museum Island is a magnificent complex of nineteenth century museums in the historic center of the city. The star attraction here is the Museum of Classical Antiquities, which houses the stunning Pergamon Altar, as well as outsized relics from Roman Miletus and Babylon. Next door is the Egyptian Museum, which features one of the world’s most recognizable artworks, the Bust of Nefertiti.

In a century of vigorous overseas exploration and collecting, the city also amassed large and important ethnographic collections that are on display in the museum complex in Dahlem, easily accessible by subway. The exhibits of Asian, African, American, and Pacific artifacts are among the best in the world.

Defeat in the First World War and the disintegration of the old order brought an end to German expansion and sparked economic collapse, hyperinflation, and political extremism. Yet it also produced a great outpouring of creativity. A spirited, youthful liveliness embraced the once staid Prussian city, sparking artistic experiments such as Dada and expressionism, great films such as M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel and the modernist architecture of the Bauhaus school. Sally Bowles may be myth, but the spirit of Cabaret lives on: stroll into Hackesche Hoefe in Mitte, or spend an evening in the Bar Jeder Vernunft nightclub, and you’ll find yourself back in the atmosphere of ‘20s Berlin.

The next chapter in the city’s history is a familiar and depressing one. In 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor and Berlin became the capital of the Third Reich. The twelve years of terror and death still define the city to a large extent, and at the end of Hitler’s war, Berlin was a heap of ruins. Almost one-fifth of its buildings had been destroyed or heavily damaged, almost one-third of its apartments were uninhabitable. Thirty percent of the city’s streets were destroyed. The historic and imposing places, theaters and civic buildings along Unter den Linden, Wilhelmstrasse, Potsdamer Platz and elsewhere in the city center lay in ruins.

In 1949, two separate German states emerged from the ashes, and Berlin, deep within the new communists state, was divided, with three-fourths of the city under the administration of the Allies (and later the Federal Republic of Germany) but far away from West Germany. It would remain so, locked in a condition popularly referred to as the “stabilization of the impossible,” for the next forty years. Berlin was turned into a stage for major-power politics, and a city of spies, tension and intrigue. In 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, a wall that cut West Berliners off and shut East Berliners in and became, almost literally, the concrete expression of the Cold War.

It stood until 1989 when East German authorities, responding reluctantly to street protests and a massive exodus of their fellow citizens through a newly opened Hungary, ordered the border between East and West opened. The Berlin Wall, seemingly rooted and enduring, immediately became superfluous.

The city has undergone a seismic transformation since the surprising demise of the East German state. The center of gravity of the city has shifted from west to east as the historic center of town, once stranded in the grey limbo of the communist east, has sprung back to life. Friedrichstrasse is a brash new shopping district; the sidewalks of Oranienburgerstrasse host dozens of restaurants, bars, and galleries, and are packed until late into the night. Eastern neighborhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain now boast the trendiest clubs and nightspots. The Brandenburg Gate, long stranded in a no-man’s land beyond the Wall, has regained its stature as the central, defining symbol of a united Berlin.

The city has survived much and triumphed. It remains uncommon, unsettling, unforgettable.

* This text was written especially for the 11^th International Social Justice Conference 2006 in Berlin.

 

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Sampson Lee Blair (slblair@buffalo.edu)

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